1. Field of the Invention
The instant disclosure relates generally to stored information systems. More particularly, this disclosure relates to management of dependencies between physical and logical elements in an application set.
2. Description of the Related Art
A business application has many dependencies between its data elements. There are also dependencies imposed and implied by the physical location where the application components are stored. Being aware and factoring the impact of these dependencies is an administratively challenging task, one that is usually not managed with adequate precision required to maintain full data integrity.
Those involved with the administrative task of managing databases may not concern themselves with the relationships between the physical implementation of the stored data particularly with placement of databases on the storage units. Meanwhile, those involved with storage may not concern themselves with the logical groupings of objects being stored.
An application is comprised of a set of objects. An accurate inventory of these objects is necessary. These objects have both a logical role and a physical implementation. However, many administrative operations are only defined for specific types of objects, which might not map to the application set of objects with uniform coverage.
For example, in certain relational databases, data backups are available by tablespace or by database, but not by file container or table. A database is comprised of a number of tablespaces which store data. A tablespace may be thought of as a child of a parent database, where the child tablespace cannot have more than one parent database. A tablespace is related to the use of the data stored in the tablespace. Thus, tablespaces are classified according to their use and how they are managed. It may be useful to be able to recover a table, but in these systems, a tablespace is the minimum granularity of backup and restore supported. On many storage systems, hardware physical backups are commonly available only by file or by storage volume. A given application can span multiple instances of each of these constructs. This is a mismatch in granularity and the physical infrastructure support available.